From a minaret, the khoja called the faithful to aksham, the evening prayer. It was a sound I associated with hot places—Cairo, Damascus—not a place where frost crunched underfoot and pockets of unmel...
Dentre meus novos deveres, tinha certeza, finalmente nenhum seria indigno de ser narrado à minha mulher. Por fim, eu me encarregaria de um trabalho cujo objetivo era melhorar a vida, em vez de assisti...
And yet [Tequamuck] refuses to see that God prospers you, and protects you, and keeps from you the sicknesses against which his powers are as nothing. So, this do I see: We must find favor with your G...
And now I tell you this: do not dwell any more on things in the past that you cannot change. Who made man frail of the flesh? Who made our lusts, our low ways and our high? Did not God? Is not He the...
All women’s lives are like that, I told myself, as I climbed the stair that led to the better-appointed rooms of the king’s house. Which of them ever is mistress of her own destiny? Highborn or peasan...
All this is true and certain. But what I do not know is this: which home welcomed him, at the end. Whichever it was—the celestial English heaven of seraphim, cherubim and ophanim, or Kietan’s warm and...
A canoe paddle is animate, because it causes something else to move. Even a humble onion has, in their view, a soul, since it causes action—pulling tears from the eyes.
The surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve.Bethia as an old woman about to die p 257
Some half-dozen children running in the fields or about the wetus—fewer
Girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy—the excision of the clitoris—and infibulation—the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and men...
Fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman’s voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia
You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, ‘How awful!’ and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee. I...
You can ask for things, but you can’t just reach out and take things as if it’s your right. A
While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and be...
We expected that the international community would put a stop to it. I believed that. I was worried about getting through a few days, that’s all, while the world—how do you say?—got its act together.
This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh.
These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that I ever fee...
The snow light flared on brightness. Blue: intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli carried by camel caravan all the way from the mountains of Afghanistan.
The practice of mutilating women’s genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The
The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly wi...